


Melifera

by Soujin



Category: Incredible Hulk (2008), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Bruce Feels, Gen, POV: Tony Stark, Team Dynamics, beeeeeeeeeeeees
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-12
Updated: 2012-10-12
Packaged: 2017-11-16 04:24:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/535468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Soujin/pseuds/Soujin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bruce Banner likes to keep bees. Tony has some feelings about this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Melifera

**Author's Note:**

  * For [raanve](https://archiveofourown.org/users/raanve/gifts).



> Raanve was my beta for this fic, because she is the BEST.

The Avengers pretty quickly move into Stark Tower, without much in the way of warning or apology or actual asking whether he was actually done finishing the renovations for them -- Tony tries to remind them that even if he has three or four houses, they're still _his_ , which meets with about as much reception as trying to get common courtesy out of these assholes ever does.

Which is, roughly, the short version on how he finds out that Bruce Banner likes to keep bees.

"Bees?" Tony says. "Who are you, Sherlock Holmes?"

"They're soothing."

"What happens if you get stung?"

"I swell up a bit," Bruce says, deadpan as Tony ever is -- he's a bastard, Tony makes a mental note to be meaner to him.

The stupid part, though, is that Tony doesn't put up more argument than that. He should. He should do it in a heartbeat, because bees and the Avengers is probably going to get someone killed, and he knows that. But no! No, he just shakes his head and ignores the whole thing as much as possible in the hopes that it won't cause Armageddon if he's not looking. Fuck him, seriously.

The first stage of beekeeping, as it turns out, involves a couple hundred dollars worth of pieces of wood showing up on Tony's doorstep. Bruce takes it all out to one of the back patios and starts putting it together.

Since secrets are about as easy to hang onto as a fresh pot of coffee around here, everybody knows right away, and as soon as Thor finds out hammering is involved, he offers to help. That gets everybody else's attention, and before Tony knows what's happening there's a box-building party on the patio. Clint and Natasha both seem to like the precision that's necessary, and Steve remarks that it's nice to have a bit of good old-fashioned do-it-with-your-hands work.

Bruce doesn't say anything, which is probably the smuggest thing he could do about it, Tony decides, as he sits in his lawn chair and designs a programme that would get all the angles exactly right without having to use the carpenter's square. _That_ is soothing, and distracts him from the fact that Thor manages to crush an entire box with Mjolnir, sending fine pine splinters all over Tony's property and probably five square miles of surrounding area.

Steve is whistling Grand Old Flag. Fuck him, too.

Thor looks over apologetically at Bruce. "Now I see why thy hammers do not measure up to the might of Mjolnir. Is everything in mortal realms so … mortal?"

"Pinewood certainly is." Bruce looks a little rattled, honestly -- well, it was a pretty good explosion. Tony picks splinters out of his jeans and doesn't say a word. Not a word. And since Pepper isn't there, nobody tells him what a good job he's doing, either.

"And thou puttest insects within?"

"Bees. They're a native pollinator." And, at the blank confused puppy face from Thor, "They help to keep all the plants growing regularly. If it wasn't for bees and other pollinators, we'd have to make all the plants have sex by hand."

"Or I could do it," Tony says, already thinking about _that_ little piece of programming, and then shoots a sour look around the patio as Clint and Natasha lose it. They are five. What the hell.

"I'm surprised you haven't already tried," Clint says.

"I have people to do that for me. Also bots."

"That's pretty sick."

"Your face is pretty sick, actually," Tony says, because he's mature, and hey, Pepper isn't there to make a snide comment. "Anyway, despite Dr. Banner's obsession with nature's way, I don't think there's anything to worry about. Because the world has me."

"Which reminds me." Clint stands, stretching. "Who wants a beer?"

Everyone's hand goes up, even Steve's. Tony looks pointedly at his tablet.

You'd think, with the potential for destruction, that getting the damn boxes built would be enough for one day. But Bruce announces, post-construction, that while the standard colour for beehives is white, they can actually be painted any colour but black, and so Tony ends up being privy to everyone's artistic sides too.

Thankfully, Thor concedes pretty early that an artistic side is something he doesn't have, and sits back with Tony to watch Clint work his magic (who the fuck would have thought that Clint is the one with the artistic side? Next it's going to be scrapbooking. Oh, hell, Clint and scrapbooking. My First Arrow and other highlights from the childhood of a master assassin. Okay, Tony needs to stop, he's making himself stupid). "What craftsmanship!" Thor says gleefully, elbows on his knees.

Clint is sitting inside a neat little circle of empty beer bottles painting a box red and gold, and Tony scowls at him. It's the least he can do to help.

"I actually thought you were sane," he tells Bruce. "You and your 'stand back, I'm doing science' and your actually doing more than taking the mandatory undergrad IT course and your fun alter-ego. And here it turns out you're a sad nerd like everybody else."

"That's new."

"What?"

"I'm a sad nerd for reasons unrelated to the science and the IT." He tucks a paintbrush behind his ear and turns his box.

"This is seriously one of the saddest things I've ever seen. It's like fourth-grade woodshop."

"Mmm. The bees are getting here Friday."

"You need help?"

"Probably."

"I say ask Cap. He doesn't have enough to do." He shades his eyes with his tablet. Steve is making a mess with the red and blue paint. "He'll probably get a merit badge for it, too, he'll like that."

Bruce just laughs, sounding maybe a touch shy but not the least bit impressed, and goes back to his box.

\---

Tony ends up getting roped into the bee thing anyway, probably because everyone else is conveniently out of the house. It's definitely on purpose. He makes a mental note to be meaner to _everyone_.

He gets stung, too, on the _face_ , right under his left eye. Bruce makes a sympathetic noise and that's about it, so Tony tries to explain to him as gently and maturely as possible that it's the most goddamn fucking painful shit-fucking thing that's ever happened to him, including getting punched out of the sky by a nuclear-missile-cum-closing-interspace-portal.

"The first one's always the worst," Bruce says, and goes back to blowing smoke on the bees.

So that's two new discoveries and it's not even noon: first, Bruce must be made of fucking steel not to hulk out every time that happens, and second, he's a bigger asshole than Tony ever realised.

"What exactly are we doing out here?" Tony demands, pretty reasonably too.

"Transferring the nuclei into the hives. They come in packages like this for transport, but they need a much bigger space to live in--"

"No, I mean, seriously, why do you do this? This is nuts. I hate to say it, because if the Hulk fucks up my house again you're on permanent time-out, but what the hell is this whole thing? You, Bruce Banner, bees. What? Come on." His eye is starting to swell up, and he squints accusingly at Bruce.

"Bees are… miraculous." Bruce sounds thoughtful; he's lifting frames of bees out of the nuke boxes and putting them in the hives bare-handed, like it's no big deal, despite the loud, mechanical humming that Tony is pretty sure means the bees are going to unleash hell any second. "They don't think for themselves. They're part of the whole. They find their place in the system and they act."

"They're little communists. I hate them on principle."

"By the way, they don't like sudden movements. That might be one of your problems."

Tony snorts and rubs his eye. It still hurts. It still hurts A Lot.

"They're so complex. It's really incredible. A lot more incredible than getting angry and turning into a monster." He scoops one up on his fingertip and holds it towards Tony, who tries to jump back as non-suddenly as possible. "This one's a drone. No sting."

"Yeah, sure. That sounds like something Clint would say right before he put it down my shirt."

Bruce laughs. At this point, Tony's starting to realize that he doesn't laugh much, so apparently it's some kind of score point if you get him to do it? Like, woo! Got Bruce to let his defenses down and be normal! That's not sad and pathetic at all!

The bee scurries over Bruce's finger and drops back into the hive. "The drones don't have any natural defenses. They're big and stupid, and the workers throw them all out before winter to conserve resources. They don't contribute anything except sex."

"That's a contribution." Tony inches forward again. "That's a big contribution. Sex is key. I know there's a queen in there somewhere, you can't tell me she's picky about the sex."

"It's purely proceative."

"Ouch. Depressing. I'm still not convinced this isn't a job for nanobots."

Bruce sets the last frame down in the new hive, and straightens up again, looking back at Tony. "Jesus Christ."

"What? Banner, seriously, if there's a bee on any vital part of my anatomy we are over."

"Your eye," he says wonderingly. "Are you allergic to bees?"

"I kind of made a career of not finding out. Why? Is my face fucked up? Great."

"We might want to take a quick trip to the emergency room."

\---

Tony's plan is to never actually forgive Bruce for this, ever. That's probably the best way to go. He does _not_ go to the ER, oh, hell, no, he has JARVIS give him a shot of epinephrine in his workshop, and then he's out of it for a while, except not so out of it that he isn't completely aware that Clint comes down and takes pictures of his swollen face.

He is going to kill Clint.

When he finally gets back upstairs Thor is sitting at the kitchen table with Natasha finishing up a bowl of raw cookie dough -- he's amazed that he even sees a sign of it, since Thor usually vacuums down cookie dough like a fucking Hoover, but maybe Natasha made him share -- and they look up when he comes in. Natasha purses her lips. Thor stares.

"Man of Iron--"

"Not a word. Not a word. Where's Banner?"

"He tends his tiny subjects."

"Yeah, fuck that, I'm not going back out there. Do we have any steak in the fridge?"

"No." Natasha's mouth is a perfectly straight line.

"Fine. Okay, that's fine."

"Wilt thou be well?" Thor ventures, around the wooden spoon in his mouth.

"I'm going back downstairs. If you see Banner, tell him he can fuck himself six ways from Sunday." He turns on his heel, at least as much as he can, because his balance is off from the shot, and stalks back down to his workshop.

He's still down there, designing the bee nanobots, when Bruce puts his head shyly around the door.

"Tony?"

"Nope."

"I'm sorry. If I'd realized you were allergic I would have been much more careful--"

"Nice to know."

"I appreciate that you're letting me keep them here. I'm not sure what the zoning is like elsewhere."

Tony grunts and goes on sketching. After a pause, Bruce comes in the rest of the way and sits down on the floor a yard or two away, his back up against the crate where Tony puts spare electronics. For a moment or two he's quiet, running a hand through his curly hair. Then he says,--

"I really like how they work together. It's like the real animal is the hive itself, and the bees are just parts, muscles and veins and tissues. I think if I found the right whole to be part of, then I'd be transforming into something a lot bigger than the other guy. Something better. Constructive instead of destructive, I guess."

He looks up, bright dark eyes fixed on Tony's face, which makes Tony feel like maybe he should do something non-assholish now. Fuck.

"Sounds good."

Well, they can't all be winners.

But Bruce smiles. "Yeah, it does. What are you working on?"

"Uh--" Tony chews his pencil. "A bee-suit that doesn't make me look like My Little Hazmat Wedding."

Bruce laughs. Goddammit, it's starting to make Tony sad every time he does that. "Good idea. --If they get a strong enough start this year we should be able to take honey off them next fall."

"Yeah?"

"Not much, but some."

"Cool. I'll see how much I can make people pay for it. Avengers' honey. Get someone on this, it'll be great advertising." Now he's doodling a bee wearing his Mark IV mask. This is dumb. This is really, really dumb. "I need some fucking coffee."

"You should probably sleep off that shot."

"Don't tell me what to do."

"I'll go make some coffee, then." He gets up with a sigh, but instead of leaving he comes over and stands beside Tony companionably, looking over his shoulder. "Great bee."

"Listen, Mr. I-want-to-be-a-worker-for-the-good-of-the-whole, the sooner you get my coffee the sooner the whole gets better."

He can hear Bruce chuckling all the way up the stairs. Ha, ha, ha.

\---

It's patently insane (actually, can you put a patent on insanity? because he should), but three months later Tony is still helping Bruce check the fucking bees every weekend for "brood pattern" and "burr comb". Bruce may very well be making those terms up as he goes along. It's not like Tony would know. The second one definitely sounds made up.

But he's there anyway, blowing smoke and providing quality comedy. Bruce, as far as he can tell, is ignoring him.

"This is a great queen."

"Yeah, your mom's a great queen," Tony says, leaning over very slowly to look at the frame Bruce is holding. "Where is she?"

"Right here." Bruce points to the one elongated body amidst the hum.

"Nice."

Which -- yeah, it is kind of nice. Bruce has this whole slow soothing way of doing the bees, narrating quietly as he does stuff like checking the frames and brushing bees out of the way so they don't get squished when he puts the hive back together. And out here Tony has a way better chance of coaxing Bruce into talking about science, and other people's shitty science, and how other people are stupid and should never have been allowed to graduate high school let alone college, and how Bruce is starting to feel like he fits in here, and how cool Tony is, and how they should definitely programme one of the AIs to fuck with Clint when he tries to steal all the beer, and oh, yeah, Bruce might be ready to start coming to Stark Tower parties and actually have fun instead of sitting on a couch being tense all night. Which is great. Getting Bruce to talk is great.

Also, Tony hasn't been stung since that first time, which ups the 'nice' quotient pretty dramatically.

Maybe he can kind of see Bruce's point about the soothing.

"Here."

"What," Tony says, staring at the teeny tiny grub on the tip of Bruce's finger.

"Try it. Drone larvae."

"'Try it'."

"Eat it," Bruce says patiently.

"Why are you doing this to me? Do it to Thor."

"Tastes a little like sweet corn." He sticks his finger in his mouth and chews thoughtfully. "Yeah. Sweet and starchy."

And Tony is sorry, but they're just not at that point in their relationship, him and the bees or him and Bruce. He puts down the smoker, looks at Bruce pointedly, and goes back into the house.

To-day is a nanobot kind of day.

**Author's Note:**

> As a hobby beekeeper myself, a lot of this was based on my personal experiences with bees. Also, you can totally eat drone larvae, but it's pretty disgusting.


End file.
